I've always been curious about how seeds *actually* work when generating random numbers, so I decided to figure it out for class yesterday and it's actually REALLY NEAT AND MAGICAL. Check out this little Excel file I made to show how a seed can creates a set of pseudo random numbers

I’m happy to report that a new article written by Daniela V. Negraia, Sophie Lohmann, @ezagheni.bsky.social, and me is now available in Social Indicators Research: link.springer.com/article/10.1... We use historical time use data to examine growth in solitary leisure in the U.S. since 1965.

RELIGION UNBUNDLED Excited that this paper proposing a new paradigm for the sociology of US religion @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social, @jlkucinskas.bsky.social, @bsteens.bsky.social and I have been working on has been accepted for publication in the American Sociological Review. osf.io/preprints/so...

Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96.

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Meet the window heat pump: A compact unit that's relatively cheap and takes half an hour to install. While they're not widely available yet, they could prove to be an important climate solution in the future. @wbur.org #energysky #decarbonization www.wbur.org/news/2026/02...

Soc Theory Nerds should check out @dsilver432.bsky.social's always illuminating Substack. The most recent missive, on "The Iron Cage of Authenticity" is fun into Tay Tay's philosophy (Charles Taylor, of course. Did you think Taylor Swift?). thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/the-iron-c...

New paper out with Marshall Taylor and @olizardo.bsky.social: Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis Instead of institutions as things that contain people, we suggest institutions as expertise distributed across people. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Just saw Keytar Bear playing a Red Line stop in single digit windchill. They are one of the best parts about living in Boston. Kudos to people who make public joy in tough times.

When we moved to Indiana in 2012, my husband was working remotely, and the isolation was rough, so he started looking for local social activities and ended up starting a rec hockey league. Sadly, the league fell apart when we left Indiana in 2022, because no one stepped up to run it in his place.

We're mourning yet again in Minnesota — and struggling to square the gut-churning video of Alex Pretti's final moments with official accounts. I'm teaching techniques of neutralization this term, so I made this quick slide on the DHS statement. Share if it's useful. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us...

The University of Minnesota has confirmed that Mr. Pretti was a 2011 graduate of our CLA Geography Department's Biology, Society, and the Environment program -- a few floors down from my sociology office. He will *not* be forgotten. apnews.com/article/immi...

With apologies for the self-promotion, if you're interested in learning about how faith leaders built the network that this clergy and religious resistance grew out of, I have just the book for you! uncpress.org/978146967316...

Attention undergrads! @pewresearch.org has more than a dozen paid internships for rising juniors and seniors this summer in Washington, DC. Find more info here: www.pewresearch.org/about/intern... Apply here: pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Center...

Wondering why those new university "civics centers" are silent on the deadly constitutional crisis happening in Minnesota. hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/civics-cen...

a useful parsing of the age-period-cohort problem for Australian loneliness in this thread

Absolutely fascinating new study in ASR: Lab experiment with 5th graders finds "even individual effort does not appear immune to the influence of socioeconomic origins." doi.org/10.1177/0003...

What an honor for our documentary podcast When the Wolves Came to be named one of The Atlantic’s Top 20 Podcasts of 2025. Wild way to end a wild year!

Read all about it here!

Fun new work on political behavior/donations: doi.org/10.1111/socf... "several important trends, all of which challenge simplistic stereotypes of American professors as some sort of Marxist intellectual vanguard or as professional mouthpieces for the US capitalist class."

Recent polling shows no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. Key measures of religiousness are holding steady in the United States, continuing a period of relative stability that began about five years ago. www.pewresearch.org/...

Ooooo cool new study: "...the relationship between religiosity and conformism is stronger in more religious countries and birth cohorts, and conformists are more likely to disaffiliate in contexts where larger proportions of the population are nonreligious." academic.oup.com/socrel/advan...

We first note that hand-wringing about the decline in US college enrollments has mistakenly linked such declines to the price of four-year colleges. But the decline is entirely driven by two-year community colleges (and by for-profit colleges). The four-year sector is the dog that didn't bark.

Stop submitting AI slop to journals and preprint servers This is anti-social behavior. It is making life harder for everyone involved except for the person submitting the slop

“WASHINGTON—Citing that a majority of Americans are irresponsible, easily distracted people who have little regard for other human beings, a new Dept of Transportation report revealed that it’s ‘actually kind of crazy’ that U.S. citizens are allowed to drive automobiles.” The Onion strikes again.

One big, achievable win for the American Sociological Association @asanews.bsky.social: create a single upload recommendation system for doctoral admissions (akin to the law school admissions). One upload for each student would be a real blessing.

We met up with @sssreligion.bsky.social recently in Minneapolis, Minnesota to ask "What Are You Working On?" Meet emerging scholars and familiar faces working on all things religious scholarship!

👏 Exciting news! PhD candidate Cam Marsinelli (@cmarsinelli.bsky.social) presented research at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Minneapolis. With Dr. Evan Stewart (@evanstewart.bsky.social), they used AI to analyze YouTube tarot readings + engagement. Congrats! 💙 #UMB #Sociology

For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13% Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006) The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%). academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Wild day for local politics. Big shifts on the Quincy, MA city council, and while most of the conversation is about broader city issues it is also a fight about...public religious expression! www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...

#MorningReads Using heart rate monitors in an intro socio class, researchers found that students showed mild to moderate stress responses, though patterns varied & didnt always align w/ demographic categories. Authors discuss implications for teaching strategies.

ANES Data Release! electionstudies.org/data-center/... The 3-wave ANES panel is now available. It merges data from 3 election studies (2016-2020-2024), the first time the ANES has collected interviews of the same respondents across 3 presidential elections.

Good morning Minneapolis! The #SSSR_RRA2025 Annual Meeting begins today with a full weekend of plenary sessions, receptions, networking events and papers exploring this year’s theme “Religion Matters.” Full program. ⬇️ #Research #SocialScience #Religion sssreligion.org/annual-meeti...

Across social media sites, political posting is tightly linked to affective #polarization - the most partisan users post the most As casual users disengage & polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

New neuroscience research shows that when people try to persuade, their brains sync less and cover fewer ideas. But when they enter a discussion to learn or compromise, their brains diverge in ways that foster creativity, understanding, & shared solutions. www.scientificamerican.com/article/good...

"...it is important to situate astrology not only in the realm of 'supernatural' and 'paranormal' belief but also in broader trends toward personality 'tests' and categories...that seek to enhance people’s understanding of themselves and their place in the world." 🌞🌝📋 doi.org/10.1177/2329...

Important work on affective climate polarization: authors find "emotional distance" on decarbonization "...supporters’ frustration at opponents’ resistance to endorsing policy to mitigate climate change, and opponents’ frustration at being morally judged" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

One man's stigma is another man's professional asset? In "Listing Addiction on Your Resume," @elenavanstee.bsky.social covers recent work from Joe Silcox and @evanstewart.bsky.social on personal experience and the emerging field of recovery coaching contexts.org/articles/lis... #sociology #sobriety

"highly transferable skills—relevant not only to academia or nonprofit work, but to ... finance, marketing, business, and more. And yet, when students express interest in these broader arenas, they’re often met with hesitation, if not outright silence, from faculty." 👏👏👏 contexts.org/blog/dream-b...

New publication! 🚨 How do church leaders foster commitment + preserve organizational vitality in the face of crisis? "There Wasn't A Playbook For This: Local Congregations and the Crises of 2020," out today in Sociology of Religion, offers insight from MN academic.oup.com/socrel/advan...

This is true for students too. Yes there are many factors impacting student reading, but working 30+ hours a week to be able to afford college is definitely one of them.

Excited for this to be out at PS -- discussion of our DPR program at @denisonuniversity.bsky.social that frontloads quant methods. @mdwilliamsphd.bsky.social and I also present survey evidence that the idea is popular among political scientists.

new pub alert! 🚨

Very much looking forward to this next month. We have a great program put together for the conference! #SSSR_RRA2025

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"What I take from Aaron is that the best way to be truly productive on the margin, is to try to build for other people and connect them together."

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

We got the all clear a few minutes ago. Thankful that things seem ok now.

Monitoring this, quite worried given everything. I’m ok - not on campus today - working on checking in with folks.

Our special issue of Sociological Focus on Religion and Politics in American Congregations is now published and all articles are open access (at least for now). This is the highest concentration of such work ever published together and it's very good. I put the details and links in a blogpost.